Mothercare, Orange, Warburtons, Specsavers, Tesco, Intel, Pepsico and Colgate were among the brands who triumphed in this year’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. The winning entries came from countries including the UK, US, India, Poland, India and Brazil, spanning four continents.

The winners were unveiled at an Awards Ceremony in London this evening, attended by 270 representatives from brands, agencies and mobile marketing firms. The last awards have just been handed out, and the party is now in full swing.

TUI Travel, Universal Music, The Body Shop and the British Journal of Photography were among the other triumphant brands, while on the agency side, AKQA, Apptitude Media, OMD, Nimbletank, Manning Gottlieb OMD, Upstream, Golden Gekko, Publicis Blueprint, Iris Mobile, Leo Burnett and Initiative were among those honoured.

Mothercare took the honours in two categories, for the Most Effective mCommerce Solution (in partnership with Demandware), and for the Most Effective Mobile Application – b2c. The judges praised the app for its comprehensive mix of advice, including a week-by-week pregnancy guide, and the ability to shop the entire Mothercare range.

Warburton’s in partnership with Golden Gekko, too the Most Effective b2b App award for its Red Insights tablet app, which is used by the baker’s Retail Field team to help manage inventory across more than 20,000 retail outlets in the UK. The app is estimated to have saved 5,000 man-days a year on time previously spent manually inputting data.

Universal Music and its agency partner, Nimbletank, took the award for Most Effective Mobile Augmented Reality Campaign for its launch effort for the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary greatest hits album, ‘GRRR!’. The campaign saw Stones fans interacting with a virtual version of the gorilla featured on the album cover art, which could be seen, using an AR app, scaling famous buildings around the world, from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House. Nimbletank also took the award for Most Effective Mobile Site for its own mobile site, described by the judges as a “bold vision of what a mobile site could be, and could look like.”

TUI Travel took the award for Most Effective Mobile Travel & Tourism Solution, in partnership with AKQA, Aditi Technologies and Creator, for its MyThomson app, which creates an ongoing dialogue and engagement with TUI customers from the moment they book their holiday to the moment it ends.

The award for Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign went to computer chip-maker Intel and its agency OMD for a crowdsourced campaign that used Shazam to encourage viewers of last year’s X-Factor final to star in an ad at the end of the show. It was a TV first that also hit the prime campaign objective of improving brand sentiment towards Intel among digital natives. Fiksu took the award for Most Effective Mobile Advertising Platform/Network for the second year running.

Chair of judges David Murphy said the task of picking the winners this year had been harder than ever. “I’m amazed at the standard of work we saw, and proud of the job the judging panel did in arriving at the 21 winners,” he said. “As always, we gave out a Highly Commended award in some categories where the result was almost too close to call, and if I’m honest, there were some categories where we could have given four or five, but when the bar is raised so high, you have to be pretty ruthless in identifying and recognising the small differences that separate the Winners from the Highly Commendeds, and the Highly Commendeds from everyone else.”

Murphy also suggested that this year’s Awards Programme represented a watershed point for the industry. “We’ve had entries from global brands since year one, but this year was the first time that mainstream media agencies have weighed in with entries, particularly in the Mobile Advertising category,” he said. “This says to me that both the brands, and the media agencies who control much of their marketing spend, have now fully seen the mobile light. It’s been led by consumers of course, and the way we live our lives, with our mobiles always to hand, but I hope, and believe, that from here on in, mobile should have a slightly easier job justifying its place at the top table when the strategy is being hammered out, rather than picking up the crumbs for a test campaign or project.”

This year’s Awards were sponsored by Celtra, Theorem, InMobi and Digital Gurus. For information about partnering with the 2014 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, contact john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com